Stuck

By a curious coincidence, before turning to the cinema, Stuart Gordon directed the stage premiere of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, while Edward Zwick made his film debut directing the screen version of Mamet's play as About Last Night...

Gordon's new picture, Stuck, combines his interest in horror with his concern for urban malaise and is inspired by a bizarre story he read of a nurse in Texas who had a hit-and-run accident in which a pedestrian got his head and shoulders stuck through her windscreen. She didn't report it to the police until the man's death a couple of days later.

Gordon has transposed the incident to New England, where the nurse becomes Brandi (Mena Suvari from American Beauty) and her victim a sad, unemployed clerk (Stephen Rea at his most affectingly dejected). The anecdote becomes a thriller when the nurse, morally unhinged by drugs and fear for her job, attempts to persuade her drug-pushing boyfriend to kill Rea and dispose of the body. Will he succeed before Rea gets free or someone comes to his rescue?

It's gory, painful, exciting and occasionally darkly comic. The accident leads to the exposure of urban accidie, for this is an apathetic community short on good Samaritans. The choice of Providence, Rhode Island, as the setting is heavily ironic.